Meeting! Hello Kitchener–Conestoga Green Party members: The Annual General Meeting for the Kitchener-Conestoga federal Electoral District Association and provincial Constituency Assocation is happening!

Join our Green Party Nominations

Feel the energy being created by the passionate and dedicated people in your community. Connect with others and learn how the Green Party plans to bring together and boost our economy, community & environment.

Open to everyone and anyone.

In addition to the chance to meet and hear from your candidate nominees, you will also get to listen to some amazing local musicians. Derek Hines and Jason White will be jazzing up the night with their incredible talents and will likely be bringing a few friends along. We may even have a couple of surprise performers join them throughout the night.

Vote in your Green Party candidates for the 2019 Federal Election! Or simply come to learn more about the Green Wave growing in Waterloo Region and across Canada.

Cambridge Nominee

Michele Braniff

Kitchener — Conestoga Nominee

Stephanie Goertz

Kitchener South — Hespeler Nominees

David Weber

Ian Graham

Archie Henderson

There will still be a contest for districts with only one nominee; the ballot also has a choice for “None Of The Above”.

In order to vote for a candidate your membership must have been activated by 6 March 2019, or if you have an expired membership you can renew it before or at the event.

Doors open at 6:30pm with some opening music. The official business gets underway at 7:15pm. We’ll have musical performances scattered throughout the night and we’ll end with an opportunity to socialize while listening to some great tunes. we’ll have some light refreshments available and Edelweiss will be providing additional food and beverage service throughout the night. They are open all day so you can even come early and get some dinner before the event.

Raise a flipper in support of your favourite Green Team — We’ll need as many cheerleaders in the stands, and coaches, trainers, kinesiologists, and physiotherapists may be required, too!

FlapJack with David Weber, Zdravko Gunjevic, Stacey Danckert, Bob Jonkman, and Mike Schreiner, candidates in the 2018 Ontario Provincial Election Our competitive flipperers are the Waterloo Region Green Party candidates for the upcoming federal election in October 2019. Meet your candidates, and shake the hand that flipped a pancake.

Making Buttons Come check out the Waterloo Region Greens information table in the arena at the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival! If you’ve got questions about Green Party issues, politics, or policies we’ll have the answers you’re looking for!

David Weber (KitSHesp) makes a button We’ll have a button making station for kids of all ages. Colour or draw your own artwork, and get it stamped into a button.

Operating the button press You’ll have a chance to meet the Green Party of Canada candidates from the five Waterloo Region ridings: Cambridge, Kitchener Centre, Waterloo, Kitchener–Conestoga, and Kitchener South–Hespeler.

Zdravko Gunjevic (Waterloo) makes a button And at 10:00am come to the main arena to see the “Glorious Greens” participate in the annual pancake flipping contest. Will there be celebrity flipperers? Come find out!

Bill 66 was introduced in the Ontario legislature just before the Christmas holidays. The short timeframe for discussion and consultation makes me think the legislators are trying to pass it before people have a chance to understand its effects. It is an omnibus bill, affecting dozens of different pieces of Ontario laws and regulations, many items of which are hidden behind indirect references, and all of which are to be voted on en masse. Omnibus bills tend to carry deleterious clauses which would never stand on their own, but which get passed only because of some other items in the same bill that are perceived to be more beneficial than the rest of the bill is bad.

Bob Jonkman Bill 66 delegation to Woolwich Township Council Committee of The Whole, Tuesday January 8th, 2019 Many groups joined together to provide information on Bill 66, and to make a concerted effort to bring our dissatisfaction to local municipal and provincial leaders. I made twodelegations to Woolwich Township Council urging them to pass a resolution to reject Bill 66 and to pledge that if passed, not to use this legislation to bypass the environmental regulations currently in place. Woolwich did pass a resolution, but stopped short of adding the pledge not to use it.

Bill 66 is a direct affront to the citizens of Ontario. Doug Ford made a pledge in May 2018 that the Green Belt areas would be not be subject to development. Now that Doug Ford is Premier of the Government of Ontario, I expect that pledge to be honoured.

Bill 66 affects existing laws and regulations at many Ministries, not just the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. It detrimentally affects the protections for workers in many separate regulations, detrimentally affects the protections for children in childcare, detrimentally affects seniors and patients in long-term care, and detrimentally affects consumers protections from wireless carriers. This is not an exhaustive list.

Bill 66 detrimentally affects environmental regulations more than any other. Under Schedule 10 municipalities no longer have to follow the regulations under the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Protection Act, Greenbelt Act, Lake Simcoe Protection Act, and the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act, among many others.

Ontario and its municipalities have experienced the greatest prosperity in the last ten years, without needing to circumvent the environmental protections put in place by previous Conservative and Liberal governments. Removing these protections now will pit one municipality against another — if one municipality allows development in a protected area, it creates pollution for all the downwind and downstream neighbours, both in that municipality as well as surrouding municipalities. There will be increased infrastructure costs for those municipalities that receive the extra traffic from the development, but none of the anticipated revenue. Bill 66 is not something municipalities have asked for for, nor is it something municipalities need.

Speculators may have purchased land in the currently protected areas. Just having Bill 66 on the table has affected land values. Currently permitted uses for protected areas will become unaffordable, and the pressure on local governments to bypass environmental protections will be great. I’m happy to see many municipalities have passed resolutions rejecting Bill 66.

The citizens of Ontario are clear: Bill 66, with all its recissions of existing laws, must not be passed. I hope the elected representatives in the Legislature will fulfill their mandate and represent their constituents’ demands to reject Bill 66.

An unfortunate combination of last-minute cancellations, car troubles, and unavailability means that expected attendance is down to a handful of people. Rather than having a few people bring potato salad for dozens and having it go to waste, it’s better to cancel now, and have another event later in the spring when more of us can meet each other.

My apologies for the late notice; these things sneak up on you and then explode.

The holidays are half over, and in the usual Christmas madness we’ve only now been able to get ourselves coordinated for our Holiday Event. Bryan Izzard has offered to host at his farmhouse in Baden on Saturday, 5 January 2019, starting at 6:00pm. I guess that makes it a Post-Holiday Event!

Join all your friends of the Waterloo Region Greens for a final celebration of the holidays and 2018’s accomplishments — and since it was an election year, there were many accomplishments!

If anyone needs a ride you can ask your fellow WR Greens on this Discussion List, or send me an e-mail to say whether you need a ride or can offer one, and I’ll sort ride-givers and ride-takers, make a list (and check it twice). Don’t forget to include your address!

And shortly after our Post-Holiday Event we’ll have another regular WR Greens meeting on Wednesday, 9 January 2019. We need to set up candidate nomination dates for the EDAs (there’s a federal election in 2019!), and start planning for the summer’s festival events and other political happenings.

While the holidays have been a wonderful break from Bill 66, we don’t have much time to send a strong, clear message to Premier Ford about our concerns this Bill could have on our community, farmland, green space, and natural resources.

I’d like to remind you of the upcoming meeting this Thursday at the same room at CIGI as our initial community meeting. Details are as follows:

update/status of groups working to book Council delegation appearances at municipal and regional councils

update/status of groups working to book MPP meetings in local ridings

time for groups to meet in breakout sessions and figure out next steps/activities

planning/discussion of January 12th Bill 66 training event/protest in Ajax

planning/preparations for January 15th event at Kitchener City Hall with ECO Dianne Saxe and other speakers

other business

We had a tremendous turnout at our initial meeting and It will be important to have at least one delegate from each community group at this next meeting to help ensure a strong, co-ordinated response to Bill 66.

Please share any questions or ideas and I hope to see you on Thursday evening.

Cheers,
Kevin.

P.S. There is a draft Citizens Toolkit for Bill 66 that is coming together as groups across the province aggregate their materials and efforts. It is evolving daily and contains some good background and supporting material against Bill 66.

P.P.S Also attached below are some initial social media images and video that are under development provincially: